Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

These were guys who could blow the shit out of a building or cut down nine unknown men, not for fun but because that was their job, they were being paid nicely for it. But who would hire them? They worked an exclusive world, mostly servicing intelligence agencies, international criminal entities, the odd billionaire who could buy his way in and needed some dirty deed done dirt quick and to hell with the expense.

Question of the day: who are they working for?

Wouldn’t it be nice to talk to these gentlemen and see what they’ve been up to? he thought, and tried to figure out how to do it. What tales they could tell…

But he had nothing, except some vague confirmation of Swagger’s claim of “contractors.” He didn’t have enough to book them, he didn’t have enough to APB them, he really didn’t even have enough to look for them. But he could put out a low-priority law enforcement request for any and all information regarding them to be forwarded to this headquarters, and maybe that would turn something up on the three stooges of death.

13255 MAGNOLIA

HOME

0915 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

It was a small house, with gravel for a lawn and a cactus for a bush. One story, flat roofed, one of dozens like itself in a huge subdivision of Henderson, itself a subdivision of Vegas, laying out under a baking, bleaching sun. A Honda Civic was parked in the driveway and a half-scraped-off AF AND SOAR! sticker curled off the bumper, which, intact, had presumably declared JOIN THE USAF AND SOAR!

They knocked, and a young woman in a pair of gym shorts and a tank top answered the door in a bit, a pair of recently removed earpieces hanging around her neck from an iPod clipped to her shorts. Her hair was cropped short, naturally blond, and her skin beautiful, although, unfortunately, she was not. But she was certainly pleasant and looked kind without the intimidating beauty that scared so many off.

“Ms. Dombrowski?” Chandler asked, flashing her badge.

Badges are always bad news, even when they’re not. Dombrowski stepped back as if hit, blinked, lost all confidence, and said, “Uh, yes?”

“I’m Special Agent Chandler and this is Investigator Swagger. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’re looking into events in the 143rd Expeditionary Wing ops center at Creech a few months back. May we speak with you for a bit, please?”

Chandler had the warm but no-bullshit, no-refusal part of police-work down pat, and the young woman, her face closing off even more darkly, stepped back to admit them.

“I’m sorry I’m sweaty,” she said, “I was on the bike.” Then she launched into a pointless explanation of how she was due at Borders at eleven, then at the Center at eight, and she didn’t have time to exercise except in the morning except it was getting harder and harder and… but she didn’t really care and neither did they.

They sat, she in a chair, the two interlocutors on the sofa. Coffee? No. Juice, water, any sort of liquid, no. Now what was this all about? And finally, “Do I need a lawyer?”

“No,” said Chandler. “We’re simply being thorough. Allegations have been raised about a certain missile shot. Maybe it wasn’t even that, just a random explosion in a city full of them. But another agency has requested we examine, and so we have to. We were in the ops center yesterday and spoke to all the pilots on duty at the time in question, Colonel Nelson, and the battle management officer, Captain Peoples. You were the only one not present, and as you were in the area, we decided to complete the interviews for the record. You are not a ‘person of interest,’ nor at this time is any legal action contemplated against you. Possibly that will change, and if it does, you will be duly informed and given the opportunity to retain counsel.”

She nodded grimly.

She swallowed.

Then she said, “I can’t tell you anything.”

“Well, that’s not a good start,” said Starling, stagily disappointed.

“If there are any infractions or any crimes or any anything, they are my doing alone and I am guilty of them and nobody else is. I will not testify against any colleague or superior officer. If you have evidence against me and are going to indict me or subpoena me or anything, I will not testify or offer a defense. If I have to go to prison I will go to prison. I’ve thought this through carefully and that’s all I’ve got to say. You seem like nice folks and I don’t think you’re here to hurt me but that’s the way it has to be.”

“Whoa,” said Swagger. “We’re not here to bust you, Ms. Dombrowski. Ma’am, nobody wants you in jail. I already handed out my share of parking tickets, so I met my quota, and I shot a couple of rustlers in the driveway, so I don’t have to bring nobody in today. We just want to talk informally about events of that duty tour and see where that leaves us.”

“It will leave me in jail,” she said. “I killed thirty-one people that day for nothing, and it’s something I’d like to forget, but if it is determined that I’m to be punished, then I will be punished. That’s all I have to say.”

There was silence in the room.

Chandler looked at Swagger, nodded, and got up and left.

The older man and the young woman were alone.

“Why are you here?” the young woman said. “I’d think you would have concluded it might work better with a female interrogator. Empathy, gender identification, feminine bonding and understanding, all that.”

“Well, you and I have something in common that cuts much deeper than gender or any of that other stuff. And that is that we killed for the king. We were the royal assassins. We loved it, we enjoyed how special it made us, we liked the way the room quieted when we walked in. But there came a time when we looked at it, and thought, why? Why did that have to happen? Did it do any good?”

She shook her head, not in denial but in recognition.

“What were you?”

“Gunnery Sergeant, USMC. Sniper. Vietnam, seventy-three to seventy-five, until I was hit bad. Ninety-three kills on the record, many more off the record. Like you I put a crosshair on something and sent a package into it and watched it die. Like you I said it was for the good of the country, or at least each man I killed wouldn’t kill an American kid, and like you, at the end, I thought to myself, well, what the hell? Who am I? Why was I so good at it, and if it was so right, how come I see faces every night? You ride an exercise bike, I crawled up in the mountains of Arkansas and stayed drunk for twenty years before I finally came back to the world.”

She just stared at him.

“I wanted to fly fighters,” she finally said. “I wasn’t good enough. So I ended up with the next best thing and I never knew the price I’d have to pay.”

“You killed some people. So it goes. The world can be a wicked place, you and I both learned that the hard way. So let me tell you, for what it’s worth from a fella who’s faced the same bad demons as you, they don’t go away, but over time they soften and over time you realize that yes, there are boys who grew to be men and fathers and citizens because you done your killing. You can say, well, what about them people you killed, they might have grown to be men and fathers and citizens and made their contribution to their place too, and I say, I can only worry about so much, and I chose to worry about other marines, just as you did. No, it ain’t easy, and those of us who take the responsibility to press the trigger and fire the bullet or the missile, a little of us dies each time, but it does mend, heal, soften, go away, and you do get your life back slowly and are capable of contributing again.”